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Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

— Gustave Flaubert

Soyez réglé dans votre vie et ordinaire comme un bourgeois, afin d'être violent et original dans vos œuvres.

Original text (French)

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Notes from Wikiquote

To Gertrude Tennant (December 25, 1876) (Correspondence v4, p. 280)

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

Sentimental Education (1869)

One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier.

What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Gustave Flaubert (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.